Wow, incredible. The response to our announcement of Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 has been enormously positive. Sitting next to sales I have an earshot sound track to the demand and interest from customers in the new visualizations, big data support and pluggable and extensible interface for easily adding third-party visualizations.

Fortunately, we have an abundance of resources available for customers to get started:

If you want to learn more about our support for new and expanded data sources—including big data, take a look at our big data resource center. It doesn’t get any easier than this to get started quickly with any of our supported big data technologies.

Or maybe you just want to get right in there and get a hands-on look at the product? Download a 30-day trail of Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5. I know you will be impressed.

Let me know what you think (leave a comment below, on our Facebook page or tweet @Pentaho). Meanwhile, I’ll keep listening to our busy sales managers and the sweet sound of the phones ringing for Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5….

I was musing the other day with a colleague about the early days of data warehousing. We reflected on how more than 20 years ago, the effort to get data into one place for analysis was mind-boggling. Then, analyzing the data in a warehouse was an even bigger challenge. For the most part these were two separate topics, two sets of users – IT and business users sitting in opposite sides of a building.

In many ways we are continually faced with the same problem, bringing together a growing variety and volume of data from flat files and delivering it to the business users who need it and support their tools of choice. It is too easy to focus on one side of the building and not the other. A unique differentiator for Pentaho is that we focus on both sides of the building. Evolving as an open source company, continuing to innovate and never losing sight of how Business Intelligence and Data Integration should not and cannot be separated — the two are simply “better together.”

With the release of Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 GA today, we continue to tightly couple business intelligence and data integration in an open, integrated platform. The new visualization features included in this release, such as geo-mapping, heat grids and scatterplots, allow our users to interactively analyze data through pictures and graphics, without leaving behind the need to analyze disparate data sources. Plus, we added new big data support and a set of online resources to help overcome technical barriers to big data adoption. For software and SaaS companies, we added a pluggable and extensible interface to easily add third-party visualizations.

The result? IT and line of business coexist. IT controls infrastructure and business users get the data they need with the tools they want. This is an idea planted in the beginning by Pentaho’s founders eight years ago. Since then the team has been busy building the platform and growing the customer and community to deliver the future of analytics — BI and DI together in a modern unified platform. Simply put — Pentaho is business analytics that work.

Take a look at the cool new visualization and big data features in Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 and see for yourself…we’d like to hear from our IT and business users to see what you think! Let us know by leaving a comment below.

It has been a very busy April as you can see from four news announcements already this month. We know you are busy so we have put together a summary of important company and product news, upcoming events and press highlights. Also, to give you an insider tip…stay tuned to Pentaho’s Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn pages this week for a BIG announcement.

Pentaho is offering a variety of training courses this spring to help you take your Pentaho skills to the next level. Attend one of our training classes to enhance your Pentaho skills, increase the efficiency of your projects and network with your peers.